Sorry. Try again.

I am very inexperienced with Linux. There are only two varieties that I have messed with: RaspberryPi OS and Manjaro. The Raspberry Pi OS seems very pleasant to somebody like me, brought up on RISC OS, because it can boot up into a GUI and it only rarely asks me for a password. Manjaro is lovely to look at, but a bit of a pain, because it keeps asking for a password the whole time. I have no doubt that it can be configured not to, but I have not yet discovered how. I recently bought a Pinebook Pro from RComp. It is a beautiful machine, with RISC OS on the emmc drive and Manjaro on an internal NVm board, so that different ssd cards inserted into the slot will boot to the different operating systems. The trouble is that I appear to have lost the password for Manjaro, so that I cannot update it. I changed the password from the default to one of my own, but now neither seem to work. If I have to overwrite Manjaro with a fresh re-install I do not mind, because I have not put any data in yet. But how do I do a re-install?

A quick Google suggests that you’d want to download a copy of Manjaro https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Pinebook_Pro_Software_Releases#Manjaro_ARM and put it on an SD card.

Boot that, and then enter a command to reset the password: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/i-forgot-my-password/106361/4

In theory. ;)

The normal boot process in the Pinebook doesn’t support booting from SD, but something different must be happening if it can dual boot Linux and RISC OS. Is there some sort of menu at start? Is SD booting an option?

You might be able to boot into single user mode and reset it that way.

https://low-orbit.net/manjaro-how-to-boot-to-terminal 2nd method.

If that gets you to a root terminal, passwd username will let you set a new password for username

The normal boot process in the Pinebook doesn’t support booting from SD, but something different must be happening if it can dual boot Linux and RISC OS.

Thanks for the help. The SD card, BOOT-MNJSD, has files:

idbloader.img 170K Raw disk image
Image 24.8Mb DOS/Windows/Executable
initramfs-linux.img 8.1Mb Raw disk image
u-boot.itb 1Mb unknown

also a file extlinux.conf containing

LABEL Manjaro ARM
KERNEL /Image
FDT /dtbs/rockchip/rk3399-pinebook-pro.dtb
APPEND initrd=/initramfs-linux.img console=ttyS2,1500000 root=/dev/nvme0n1p2 rw rootwait audit=0 splash plymouth-ignore-serial-console

There were some directories too.

May I presume that these are the components of U-boot, whatever that is? My impression is that the Pinebook Pro has had a lot of development recently, but unfortunately the documentation online and YouTube videos are not very explicitly dated. So there is a lot of out-of-date, probably unremovable, crud to mislead the unexperienced such as me.

But how do I do a re-install?

If I were you, I’d call Andrew Rawnsley and get him to advise you. Horses mouth and all that…

Andrew told me what to do. I have to flash the Manjaro image file to the NVMe, to get a clean reinstall. But that still leaves a problem. There appears to be no version of balenaEtcher that runs under Manjaro – but there is for the Rpi. Good so far. But when I run it, it asks for a password to access the NVMe — aargh, that is why I am doing this.

I am having a similar problem trying to use the Raspberry Pi Imager tool to install the new Debian Bookworm OS on an old SD-card. It asks for a password to access the SD-card.

So balenaEtcher and Imager are both demanding passwords to access the target medium they are supposed to be overwriting. Is there a way of wiping the target media, and will that let the etcher tools work?

Have you tried supplying your user password at the prompt?

If Stuarts suggestion doesn’t work.

There appears to be no version of balenaEtcher that runs under Manjaro

Would you not use the Manjaro-ARM-Flasher app?

If you have flashed Manjaro to the SDCard then you run it initially from there and then either run the Manjaro ARM Flasher app , that should be a pre-installed app, or install it and then run.

You can even download the latest Manjaro via it or use a pre installed Manjaro image.

It may be you also have to wipe the eMMC boot area at some stage but I imagine that was part of the instructions Andrew gave.

If in doubt I would suggest contacting him again as if you are not careful you could write to the onboard flash which will cause further issues.

Would you not use the Manjaro-ARM-Flasher app?

What Manjaro-ARM-Flasher app? Where do I find that?

I seem to be going round in circles. With no super-user password the installation tools don’t work. So I cannot start over with a new installation. There has to be a way of breaking out of this cycle.

What happens when you type sudo date? Can you use your password there?

Would something like GParted work?
Remove all the partitions, then put basic one on that the imager is then happy to overwrite.
I’ve used this approach before when the imager has not recognised a card.

Linux-formatted storage (disks, cards, etc.) tends to be formatted as EXT4. This means it must have the correct permissions set to be used across different copies of Linux- potentially one reason you can’t access the SDCard.

The password needed to format the SDCard or partition will be the system (sudo, su) password of the Linux distribution you are on. GParted or Disks are your friends.

Therefore, to be successful, you’ll need to identify and re-format the Manjaro partition and re-install it there. However, in saying that, from my experience with my RPi, I suspect you may need to create a Manjaro installation on an SDCard, then copy the relevant files into a Bootable partition and set up the SDCard to see them.

Elesar has a support ticket system- Does Andrew have such a system in place?

@Gavin – it’s not a keyboard layout thing is it? Do the ‘root’ passwords you’re trying have non-alphanumerics in? Also, even alphas can be wonky. I once accidentally installed a NT system with a Belgian keyboard layout (was adjacent to British in the list) and my then domain password wasn’t accepted but co-worker’s was! QWERTZ.

Thanks for all the helpful suggestions. I have had success at last, using the rpi-imager application from the commandline. So now I have a new clean install of Manjaro on the Pbpro and the latest (Bookworm) Raspberry Pi OS on an SD-card. Phew!

To pitch in I run latest Fedora w. Cinnamon desktop on a 5 yr old Acer Swift atm and still miss RISC OS’ productivity. Boo hoo.. :/

I spoke too soon. It seems that Wifi, Audio, Internet and Battery State are not functioning in the Manjaro I thought I had installed. I have read Andrew’s notes Maintain.pdf and copied the boot partition files from the NVMe memory to that of the SD-card. But still no cigar. Evidently whole chunks of functionality are missing. Can anybody with more Linux experience than I diagnose what is wrong?

Can Andrew supply you with a Manjaro image that came with the Pinebook Pro rather than taking one off the interweb? There are reports of Manjaro updates stopping audio working, for instance.

Panic over. I was using the wrong SD-card. Everything is working now.

It turns out, or it may have turned out, that all my problems with passwords on the Pinebook Pro are down to a hardware feature that I should have known about. If the PBPro’s trackpad is enabled, the slightest touch on it will temporarily disable the keyboard. So when you enter a password not all the characters may get through, leading to Sorry, try again . The combination FN+F5 enables/disables the trackpad. If the ask_for_a_password routine simply disabled the trackpad until it returned, Manjaro would be a bit friendlier.

the slightest touch on it will temporarily disable the keyboard.

Well, that’s a monumentally dumb idea. Or is shift-clicking (etc) just not a thing in the Linux world?

Well, that’s a monumentally dumb idea.

The trackpad? Tempted to agree.

It’s the other way around which is more useful – disabling the trackpad when the keyboard is being used. I’m trying to type on my work laptop and if my palm gets within half a mm of the huge trackpad it moves the cursor and messes up what I’m typing.

For me, disabling the trackpad is the best. Full stop.

I really dislike using the things.

I much prefer a trackpad to a mouse. A decent trackerball is a lot better though – but the Marconi one is the only one I’ve ever had that I’d call “decent”. I converted one to PS2 to use with an old PC, but I don’t have any computer that uses PS2 any longer, and I’ve not yet got round to converting one to USB 8~(

I really dislike using the things.

I fear that those who hate touchpads have really only been exposed to those whose driver authors implemented the bare minimum.

• Accidental nudges seen as taps? Some drivers understand this and ignore those nudges.
• Can’t pinch to zoom? Why not?
• Want to pick up something and move it? You ought to be able to double-tap-hold on it.
• Move it across the screen? You ought to be able to move your finger to the side of the pad and the thing will keep going until you pull your finger back (not unlike how the iconbar auto scroll works).

The touchpad in the EeePC (Synaptics) was brilliant, and could do other stuff like hold a finger in the centre and flick up or down the side to scroll. It’s primarily responsible for why I like to use a good touchpad, when you’re used to it, it’s so much better than a mouse.

The touchpad on my “freebie” Android portable, on the other hand, is absolutely dreadful. It pretends to be a mouse and… that’s about it. Pinch? Nope. Click… aw eff off, I didn’t mean that! (as three different apps start in simply moving the pointer across the screen)

That being said, given how good Android’s support of foreign accents is when using an English language Bluetooth keyboard (that is to say, nonexistent if you don’t use American International layout – this was a problem even RISC OS had sussed in 1992!), I rather suspect that this is a failing of Android, it probably literally sees the thing as “a weird pointing device”.

Anyway, to the touchpad haters… you probably needed a better touchpad. ;)
(or to fiddle in the settings, sometimes they default to having all the useful stuff turned off in order to not scare the newbies)

A decent trackerball is a lot better though

I used a trackerball a long time ago. Seemed like something that was designed for special needs, what with this big friendly ball in the middle and two large paddles either side.
As you might have guessed, I used it on Windows (3.11). No middle button, oh and I think it plugged into the serial port.
It was good in that it just sat there waiting and didn’t require lots of desk space to work, plus you could actually be pretty precise with it.

But, like with traditional mice, there is a greater range of gestures available these days. For example if I wanted to take a closer look at a picture on a web page, I would pinch out (zooms in) and then tap-hold to grab the page and then move my finger around to look at different parts of the picture. A good touchpad will offer stuff like that. As will many mobile devices (Android does that the same way, I’d be surprised if iOS doesn’t).

For those with a keyboard and mouse? Well… It’s a lot more fiddling involved. Maybe menus if you can’t remember the shortcuts (is it Firefox or NetSurf that zooms with Ctrl and Plus/Minus ?

Full stop.

Nah, full stop was that weird little nipple that turned up in laptops before they invented touchpads. Placed right where it would get hit frequently, damn near impossible to control, and about as accurate as firing chewed up paper out of the casing of a biro…